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First meeting of the Barents Sea Forum

The dialogue forums in the OCEANS PACT project are important arenas for stakeholders and researchers to meet and discuss marine conflicts and possibilities to transform them. The Norwegian team organized its first dialogue meeting at the end of November last year. The Barents Sea Forum consists of representatives of the Norwegian Fishermen’s Association, the Norwegian Coastal Fishermen’s Association, Seafood Norway, Equinor, Petro Arctic, the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries, and Friends of ...

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Engaging Communities in Research

Mission statement Intractable and deep-rooted struggles over ownership, rights, benefits, and human-nature relationships are commonplace on our Blue Planet. Ocean sustainability depends on transformative dialogue, deliberation and conflict resolution to reconcile the divergent interests, values and perspectives of ocean and coastal communities, stakeholders and governing authorities from the local to global level. The mission of OCEANS PACT is to develop innovative and practical ways to ...

OCEANS PACT has been launched

The OCEANS PACT project has officially begun as of August 2020. Although facing the challenges of the ongoing pandemic, the different research teams have launched their case studies. OCEANS PACT is an ambitious international project bringing together researchers as well as marine sustainability stakeholders from around the globe to contribute to the field of ocean conflict research. The knowledge gained from the project will be used to develop ocean conflict transformation approaches as a means to ...

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Life on earth depends on healthy oceans. But our oceans are in decline. There is mounting pressure on finite marine resources because of the increasing number of competing activities, technological advances, and over-exploitation, pollution and climate change.

Conflicts about how to harness benefits from marine resources are widespread, intensifying, and unfolding in unprecedented ways. There are long-standing disputes between activities like fisheries, and oil and gas exploitation. New conflicts are emerging, e.g., sea-level rise could displace millions on low-lying coasts, and submerge some small island nations. Ocean conflicts reflect deep-rooted struggles over ownership, rights, benefits, and human-nature relationships on our Blue Planet.

Surprisingly, ocean conflict resolution is an under-developed field of scholarship and practice. OCEANS PACT argues that ocean sustainability prospects depend on building tailor-made capabilities to analyze, productively manage, and where possible transform ocean conflicts.

We construct a co-designed, transdisciplinary, action research approach. We aim to develop deep insights about diverse ocean conflicts through real-world collaboration of context-specific research teams that include stakeholder partners, social and natural scientists, and conflict resolution experts. Our comparative analysis focuses on conflicts that traverse the Global North and South, in South Africa, India, Brazil, Norway/Barents Sea, Baltic Sea and United States.

We investigate how existing conflict resolution practices help or hinder ocean sustainability. We examine how formal interventions, e.g., law, and informal practices, e.g., negotiation, can be harnessed to unlock the transformative potential of conflict resolution.

The new knowledge gained will be used to develop and test ocean conflict resolution tools and practices. OCEANS PACT will generate significant scientific, socio-political and practice benefits in our case studies, and enable scaling up of insights, tools and conflict resolution practices that foster global ocean sustainability.

Project funding

OCEANS PACT receives funding from Belmont Forum’s Collaborative Research Action on Ocean Sustainability within the framework of the UN Sustainable Development Goal no. 14 (Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development). Belmont Forum is an international partnership of funding organizations, science councils, and regional consortia committed to the advancement of transdisciplinary science.